1. Technical Field
The invention relates to databases used for investment and market analysis. More particularly, the invention relates to investment and market analysis databases with product/service hierarchy structures.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Qualitative research and common sense can help an investor spot publicly traded companies that are under-valued or over-valued. An under-valued company is generally a good company in which to invest, and conversely an overvalued company is one that should be divested. It has been the present inventors"" experience that qualitative information often precedes any quantitative changes that significantly impact a publicly traded company""s operating results. Thus, the ability to organize the qualitative information that is publicly available can provide investors with early signals to act before the rest of the investment community does.
In the prior art, qualitative research has been a time-intensive, inexact, and all too manual a process. Consequently, many investors do not focus on qualitative issues because there has been no practical tool for analyzing the large volume of available qualitative data. Nor has there been an easy way to organize such data into useful investment information. Such investors therefore act on the quantitative changes that impact a company""s operating results, e.g. earnings per share. Early information about a company""s quantitative changes is often classified as insider information, and is illegal to use in most situations.
It is important to provide investors with a way to filter the key qualitative criteria that is essential for accurate comparative valuation and peer-group analysis. What is lacking in the commercial marketplace is a tool for classifying each competitor""s product or service, strategic partners, major customers, their end-user markets served, any regulatory agencies that affect the business, their particular business strategy, and other such significant data.
It would be advantageous to provide a product-hierarchy database that organizes accurate comparable industry, sector, sub-sector, and group market performance and stock investment information centered around the products produced and services performed of each company and their true competitors, with each product or service type created as an index. Such product hierarchy should enable the creation of an index for each product or service type which can be valued and measured.
The invention provides a product-hierarchy database that organizes accurate comparable industry, sector, sub-sector, and group market performance and stock investment information centered around the products produced and services performed of each company and their true competitors, with each product or service type created as an index. Such product hierarchy enables the creation of an index for each product or service type which can be valued and measured.
A product hierarchy database is provided that organizes and tracks company market performance and stock investment information by the products and services produced and offered by each competitor. The product hierarchy is created in the database independently of the companies. The companies that produce each product are then relationally linked to each product in the hierarchy that corresponds to a product produced or service performed by each company. An investment information service includes the product hierarchy database and makes it accessible to investor and analyst subscribers through a query system across the Internet. Data entry personnel continually load qualitative and quantitative information about companies and their products through a product hierarchy generator connected to the product hierarchy database. Subscribers can punch-through to query individual data items, and they can find out what relationships exist between all the important aspects of the companies and the products being tracked. The invention also provides performance criteria by industry, sector, sub-sector, and group, thereby allowing industry, sector, sub-sector, and group-based qualitative assessment.